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It's following an example story that it has read.

> To solve a math expression, you need to follow the order of operations: parentheses, exponents, multiplication/division, and addition/subtraction (PEMDAS).1 Here are the steps to solve your expression:

It isn't actually thinking about any of that statement. That's just boilerplate that goes at the beginning of this story. It's what bing is familiar seeing as a continuation to your prompt, "show your work, step by step".

It gets more complicated when it shows addition being correctly simplified, but that behavior is still present in the examples in its training corpus.

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The thinking and understanding happened when the first person wrote the original story. It also happened when people provided examples of arithmetic expressions being simplified, though I suspect bing has some extra behavior inserted here.

All the thought and meaning people put into text gets organized into patterns. LLMs find a prompt in the patterns they modeled, and "continues" the patterns. We find meaning correctly organized in the result. That's the whole story.



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